Denmark's bang-it-up Safri Duo entertains Jakarta clubbers

Joseph Mangga, Contributor, Jakarta

Surveying the massive array of lighting and musical equipment crowding Embassy's dance floor, it truly looked as if we were all in for one hell of a show. Not just some inanimate DJ this time, cloistered away in a shadowy DJ booth over a mixer and a couple of barely visible turntables.

This was a huge stage with real instruments and real musicians playing real live music! I truly love dancing to music mixed by live DJs, but there is only so little that a DJ has at their disposal to visually stimulate an audience. And this was a crowd with high expectations that was in no mood for the ordinary!

For some strange reason I expected Safri Duo -- the samba drum-bashing pair that's been conquering the global dance charts with thermonuclear percussive proportions -- to be from Brazil. In fact, they just had to be!

Everyone knows that the only really great percussionists on the planet are either native-borne African tribal drummers, transcendental tablas-pounding Indian or Pakistani mystics, who play with the likes of Ravi Shankar or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, or else South Americans that are simply popped from their mother's loins with those infectious natural rhythms already pulsating through their genitals and other bodily appendages.

The two young dudes on the cover of Episode (II) -- Safri Duo's debut album (in fact, whatever happened to Episode (I)?) -- are just too damn white or blonde to be former spear-chucking African bushmen or curry-snorting subcontinental music gurus, so they just had to be from Brazil. But of course, they ain't!

This became more than apparent when the two new club-scene darlings leapt onto the stage and introduced themselves as none other than Uffe Savery and Morten Fritis. Big pause, please. I don't recall too many similar-sounding names on Brazil's winning team at the FIFA World Cup; but then again, there were more than a few names like that on the Danish squad, which lost to England in the second round.

Danes. Oh my God! And classically trained great ones at that! Two dudes who beat their wares as child performers in the Tivoli Garden Boys' Guard? Who then went on to play with the Denmark Symphonic Orchestra at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall? Who got their big break last summer from DJ Judge Jules, who featured them at one of his Judgement Sunday raves at Club Eden in Ibiza, and the crowd went absolutely bonkers?

Denmark has never been a country known for its export of quadruple-platinum-selling musical acts, let alone an instant number one club classic like Played-A-Live (also known as The Bongo Song), the song that has literally pounded it's way onto virtually every single solitary dance floor on the known planet. From it's deafening dueling-bongo duet opener to the contagious carnival-like synthesizer trance-music theme that kicks-in later - the live recording is a track guaranteed to send even the most jaded of crowds into an instant uncontrollable frenzy.

And that's exactly the tune Safri Duo chose to open their two -hour Embassy performance with, and exactly the same response they got from the standing-room-only squeeze of nearly two- thousand Indonesian clubbers. The roped-off area in front of the stage was finally opened, then things really got interesting. Each man was surrounded by an absolute armada of percussion: Bongos, congas, sambas and tom toms; high-hats, kettles, timpani and snares.

Savery and Fritis then proceeded to beat the living snot out of anything that didn't move, including a large vibraphone, that Savery consummately hammered on the songs A-Gusta and Baya Baya; and six huge polyethylene tubes that Fritis repeatedly struck with mousepad-covered ping-pong paddles to create the eerie and echoing booming-effect, featured prominently on tracks like Snakefood and Everything.

And these two were not alone in their musical mayhem. Also giving their best was a young Danish keyboard virtuoso and a rock-solid bass player. It was also the bassman's 27th birthday.

The Jakarta concert was the last stop on an Asia tour, that also saw Safri Duo at Studio East in Bandung the previous evening. On Monday, they all flew back to Denmark to prepare for a Sept. 7 special engagement with French electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre; let alone promote their latest commercial release, an inspiring cover of the Doobie Brothers' Sweet Freedom that Jakarta was also gratefully treated to.

With over two million in total sales, several European MTV awards and months of Played-A-Live at number one in the British and U.S. dance charts, the big question is, what are these drum- happy Danes going to do for an encore?

When that time finally came at Embassy, they apparently ran out of material, so they finished up with a second bash through Played-A-Live, but nobody seemed to notice. All I can say is that y'all should of been there!